In case it’s not clear, I wrote a story earlier this year called Dinner Break, and recently edited it. This blog isn’t going to be me waxing philosophical about my supper or anything like that. As is often the case, I had some thoughts about the story while writing it, different thoughts after finishing it, and radically different thoughts after editing it. Especially since I want to get back into blogging more often, I thought I’d share them.

Fun fact: Dinner Break was the fourth story I plotted out in my head. Being More Social, The Good The Bad and the Molly, Consequences, and then Dinner Break. All four were fully fleshed out and thought out before I had even published Panopticon, which means that Dinner Break in particular was rattling around in my head for more than seven years. This does have a nice side effect: When it’s time to actually write the story, I can look at the plot again with what feels like a fresh perspective and immediately know what ideas work and what ideas don’t. One commenter on another site recently noted that they feel they can tell which of my stories are commissioned because there’s a “sureness” in my writing that comes out more in stories I wholly created. It’s a fascinating thing to reflect on, and whether it’s true or not is not up to me to decide, but if it’s true, the preserving of ideas over time likely helps that sureness.

The inspiration of the story came from a random place, as inspiration often does. Sometimes my stories are inspired by real life events, either transparently or subtly. Mutual Benefits was based on the fact that in grade 12 I was asked by my Data Management teacher to tutor the hottest girl in the school, and she loudly complained about wanting sex to her friend on the way to the library, either oblivious to the fact that I was there or simply not caring. The rest of the story evolved into its own creation from there. The Good The Bad and the Molly was inspired by how I had betrayed the trust of a woman I knew, partially on the advice of a mutual friend (although the betrayal didn’t involve anything sexual in any way) and the story became, needless to say, quite different. Not many other stories took direct inspiration from my life, although occasionally I’d remember a one-liner someone told me that sounded incredible to hear and placed it into one of my stories. Odds are, if you read a one-liner in one of my stories and thought, “Wow, that was raw,” it may very well have come from someone I’d overheard.

Sometimes my stories take inspiration from random things I encounter in my life. When in Toronto was inspired by a music video I happened to see, for example. Similarly, my imagination started weaving together Dinner Break after I started watching a relatively obscure video series: After Hours, from the YouTube channel Cracked. It was basically about four friends that work at Cracked that gather after hours in a diner to discuss movies together. The content is good, but what sells the series is the chemistry between the four nerds that populate the series. The setting and chemistry struck me, and my imagination took it over from there.

I don’t really feel like I make “decisions” when I make stories, but rather, my imagination fills in the gaps and crafts the plot subconsciously, and I write down what I can “see” in my imagination. I’m less of a puppeteer of my characters, and more of a… journalist, I guess. In this way, I felt like I didn’t have much direct conscious say over what happens in my stories, and this one was no exception. In this way, it felt intuitive that I knew that four people were gathering at a diner to discuss something, and this was a sex story. Obviously, they were four old friends meeting up and getting into discussions about their sexual history. This creates delightful little questions that are fun to answer. Why would four friends discuss their sex lives with each other, what kind of people would do that? Feel it out. What do they want to accomplish by telling their friends about a sexual adventure? Feel it out. Does telling each other these stories actually change anything about their current lives, or do they just miss the past? Feel it out.

It became clear that this story was going to have a lot of Very Special Episode themes where the protagonist learns a hard lesson. The cool thing about that is that learning a hard lesson requires having a big character flaw, and because I was writing older versions of them as well as younger, I could show both how they acted with the flaw and how they’ve already changed afterwards. Burton was particularly fun to write in this way – he’s a good-looking guy and is very confident by nature. As a result, he loves impressing others, including sexually, and enjoys being desired. In the present, he enjoys this respectfully, even if he occasionally slips up, but in his chapter, he clearly wasn’t respectful to women at all, often to his own embarrassment. I really enjoyed a lot of the opportunities to explore character and character building that offered me.

It was also really fun to incorporate characters that were primarily explored in other stories. Again referencing Burton’s chapter, not only was Nicole as a character explored before she ever met Adam, but clever readers will realize that the chapter even was referenced in Only If You Want, another story that I wrote afterwards. I truly love writing stories about Hazelwood High now, because I’ve effectively constructed a sandbox full of fun characters, and as long as I keep in mind who has graduated by when, I can discover in real time whose stories intersect with whose. And that’s ultimately kind of realistic in a way – nobody exists in a vacuum. Especially in a social institution like school, the students are going to interact with each other. The popular kids are going to make friends and enemies with other popular kids. Why not tell the same story from the perspective of different characters, or stories that keep painting parts of some mythical complete picture?

There is an inherent difficulty to writing stories that take place in high school. I’ve touched on this before – high schoolers, especially ninth graders, are much less mature than we think they are. The more you refine your style and are able to write articulate dialogue that shows maturity, the more out of touch you are with the very people you’re writing about. On the flipside of that same coin, the more you dig in your heels and do your best to write and think like a ninth grader to make a realistic story, the worse your own social life gets. At least in my case, it’s very hard to live in the world of an immature teenager and realistically write them, and then turn that part of your brain off and go live your own life. And that’s before you get the opinions of people taken into account. Especially early on when I was writing Being More Social and to an extent Mutual Benefits, I got comments and emails talking about how immature Adam or Quinn was and how their irrational choices and dramatic tendencies were annoying and “unrealistic,” and that they had to stop writing. Annoying, I can absolutely agree with. But to call drama and bad choices from a ninth grader and especially an antisocial nerd who suddenly was practically pushed into the popular crowd at the tail end of high school unrealistic… It seems very realistic indeed. If anything, the rare instances of levelheadedness from them was what was truly unrealistic. I think a lot of us truly wish to believe we were more mature than we were in high school, and fool ourselves into thinking it’s true. Luckily, I went to high school in the beginning of the social media era – I have chat logs from messenger apps from my high school years. I know how cringy people were, and are.

In Dinner Break specifically, I was writing essentially three stories about the dumbest choices three very different people made in high school, and Tiffany’s story. If you know, you know. Because of that, I had to let go of my ego and write people being particularly immature, but also write it in a way that made their inner monologues truly believe they were doing what was right. That’s often the key to conflict in storytelling – every character needs to believe they’re doing the right thing, or at least the most reasonable thing possible, all while believing others aren’t being as moral and/or reasonable. All while pushing thirty years old. That aspect was tough, and I’m unsure if I did it justice, but I do know that at a certain point, all four stories clicked and it felt good to write them. I’ll count that as a victory.

I always release my stories unsure of how they’ll be taken by the community, but I think that not knowing is better than knowing all too well. I refuse to install rating systems and even story view counters for that reason, among others. I don’t want to start a series and feel excited to write it, only to come back to a single one-star rating and ten views compared to a thousand views with glowing ratings from a story I can’t work on at the moment. I’m too emotionally sensitive for that. (I’m also aware that more experimental stories and, to be blunt, gay stories, will just always do worse when it comes to public voting from a mostly straight audience, and I don’t want to hand a group that power when the rare bigot could abuse it). In this way, I am not entirely sure how Dinner Break has been perceived by you all. I know that a sizeable part of my readers enjoy the way Hazelwood High is a bigger story I tell in chunks, so I hope this particular chunk has been enjoyed. That said, maybe the tales of immaturity weren’t enjoyed, and people prefer uncomplicated sex stories (in which case, what the absolute hell are you doing here??). Ultimately, as long as I enjoyed writing it, and someone enjoyed reading it, I’m glad it exists. It was nice to edit Dinner Break and cultivate new thoughts as well as rethinking old ones. I hope you reading this enjoyed the story, and if not, fear not, more are always on the way. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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